Outlook Goes Down Again for Microsoft, Two Months After Its Last Major Outage

Summary

Microsoft confirmed yesterday that Outlook was down for users worldwide, locking people out of their inboxes with no cause initially given. The company said on its status account that some infrastructure was under heavy load and that it was spreading traffic across more of its network to ease the pressure. The outage followed a days-long Microsoft 365 failure in September that Microsoft blamed on an authentication configuration problem.

Why it matters

Anyone who runs a workday through Outlook lost access to it for the second time in two months, which makes a backup way to reach people worth having before the next one hits.

HTD Says

Two Outlook outages in two months stopped looking like bad luck and started looking like a pattern Microsoft still hasn’t explained. I think the best thing to come from this outage was all of the memes and posts about getting a mid-week mini vacation. And it was all timed perfectly with the NVIDIA soap opera we are also living through right now.

This was pretty widespread and global. It was also quite local for me. My daughter’s work was down, and I got a text from my dad saying he couldn’t access his Stanford email on three of his devices. A quick search found a Stanford IT page talking about the outage (as proof to him).

I’m super curious about the root cause, and I’m sure others are too. Hack? Probably not. DDoS? Maybe. Rogue AI? Not sure. Deploying a bad config? This is what I’m guessing. Was the config or the push governed or managed by AI? Probably. Caused by layoffs, staffing shortages, and AI replacements? Hmmm.

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Source:

TechCrunch